Water as Collaborator
I am an Irish artist-researcher whose practice investigates how contemplative expanded photographic practice can transform our relationship with water and the environments we inhabit. Working across photography, moving image, sound and installation, I create immersive experiences that explore perception, embodiment and ecological attention. My work has evolved through a practice-based PhD, The Perception of Water: Capturing the Sublime through Photographic Abstractions, where I developed contemplation as an artistic research methodology and began to understand water not simply as a subject, but as a collaborator.
Before undertaking doctoral research, I completed an MA with Distinction in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication. My practice has since shifted from documentary image-making towards abstraction, immersive installation and interdisciplinary artistic research. This evolution has been supported through residencies in Ireland and Catalonia, including Interface Inagh, Lo Pati Art Centre and the Heinrich Böll Residency on Achill Island, where sustained engagement with place has become central to my methodology.
Alongside research, I have exhibited widely in Ireland, the UK and Spain through solo and group exhibitions and regularly present artist talks on my work. These experiences have strengthened my commitment to sharing artistic research through dialogue, collaboration and public engagement.
I see art as a way of generating knowledge rather than illustrating ideas. Through sustained encounters with water, I investigate how transformed attention can cultivate more reciprocal ecological relationships. As my practice continues to expand beyond photography into immersive spatial environments, I am interested in collaborating across disciplines to explore new ways in which artistic practice can shape how we perceive, inhabit and care for the living world.
Water as Collaborator proposes a new phase of my practice-led research through the development of a 360° cinematic environment using moving image, projection mapping & spatial sound. Rather than representing water as an object to be observed, the project approaches water as an active collaborator whose rhythms, movements & transformations shape the artwork itself. I do not begin with images. I begin with encounters.
The project emerges from my doctoral research into contemplative expanded photographic practice, where sustained encounters with coastal environments revealed that ecological awareness begins not with information but with perception. Instead of communicating environmental crisis through facts or statistics, the work investigates how transformed attention might cultivate more reciprocal relationships with the living world.
The installation will not be predetermined. It will emerge through an iterative process of contemplative engagement with water, allowing each site, tide, weather system & encounter to influence the final form. Photography, moving image & sound become methods of listening rather than recording, creating an immersive spatial experience that invites visitors to slow down, remain present & rediscover their relationship with water.
Rather than overwhelming audiences with spectacle, Water as Collaborator seeks to create conditions for ecological attunement. Visitors are invited into an environment where familiar distinctions between observer & landscape begin to dissolve, encouraging reflection on our place within the planetary systems that sustain us.
LINA offers an ideal context in which to develop this project collaboratively with artists, architects & spatial practitioners. Through dialogue across disciplines, I aim to investigate how contemplative artistic practice can evolve beyond photographic representation into immersive spatial environments that foster ecological perception & renewed relationships between people and place.